IMLS Grant Awarded to 'Our Americas' Archive Partnership
Rice’s Fondren Library and Humanities Research Center, in partnership with the Maryland Institute for the Humanities (MITH) at University of Maryland were awarded 2007 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for $979,578.
The three-year National Leadership Grant will be matched by an additional $980,613 in cost sharing by the praticipating institutions. The project will develop an innovative approach to helping users search, browse, analyze, and share content from distributed online collections. Two online collections of materials in English and Spanish, The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), and a new digital archive of materials to be developed at Rice, will provide an initial corpus for testing the tools. Rice principle investigators Geneva Henry (Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative) and Caroline Levander (Director, Humanities Research Center), along with MITH Director Neal Fraistat are undertaking this innovative digital humanities project with a view to supporting scholarly inquiry into the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. As Geneva Henry says, “our goal is to develop new ways of doing research as well as new objects of study—to create a new, interactive community of scholarly inquiry.”
Two significant online collections of materials in English and Spanish supporting the interdisciplinary field of American Studies—Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) [http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/] and a new digital archive of multilingual materials being developed at Rice [http://rudr.rice.edu/handle/1911/9219]—provide an initial corpus for developing and testing these new digital tools. The two multilingual archives illustrate the complex politics and histories that characterize the American hemisphere, but they also provide unique opportunities to further digital research in the humanities. Geographic visualization as well as new social tagging and tag cloud cluster models are just some of the new interface techniques that the Our Americas Archive Partnership will develop with the goal of creating innovative research pathways. As Caroline Levander comments, “we see this as a first step in furthering scholarly dialogue and research across borders by making hemispheric material available open access worldwide. Our goal is to further develop innovative research tools that will help generate a collaborative, transnational research community.”
"Cultural institutions energize their communities by not just preserving culture, heritage, and knowledge, but by supporting life-long learning and engagement. National Leadership Grants harness the work of the best of these institutions. By promoting innovation and partnerships, they allow these institutions to create national models that address the challenges of the broader library and museum communities, and help strengthen their impact,” stated Anne-Imelda M. Radice, PhD, Director of IMLS.
National Leadership Grants help libraries and museums collaborate, build digital resources, and conduct research and demonstration projects. The selected projects are national models that will help foster individual achievement, community responsibility, and life-long learning. This year the program had 213 applicants requesting more than $78 million. 43 awards were made, totaling $18,661,716 with an additional $24 million provided in matching funds.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Its mission is to grow and sustain a “Nation of Learners” because life-long learning is essential to a democratic society and individual success. Through its grant making, convenings, research and publications, the Institute empowers museums and libraries nationwide to provide leadership and services to enhance learning in families and communities, sustain cultural heritage, build twenty-first-century skills, and increase civic participation. To learn more about the Institute, please visit: http://www.imls.gov.
About the 'Our Americas' Archive Partnership
The HRC is collaborating with the University of Maryland's Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), (which collects texts written in or about the Americas from 1492 to about 1820) and the Rice Americas Collection, which specializes in materials dating from 1811 to 1920. By making available texts from across the Americas in digital format and free of charge to the public, the Our Americas Archive Partnership aims to foster new research that examines American literatures from a hemispheric perspective, to develop curricular models and teaching materials that embody a hemispheric approach to the study of the early Americas, as well as to generate professional and intellectual exchanges among scholars from various fields. Click here for descriptions of the texts included in the Rice Americas Collection.
Conceptual Framework: Our Americas Archive Partnership Overview:
For many decades, the study of literature and history has been partitioned into national categories. This archive adopts a new paradigm for the study of American cultural and literary history that situates them in the context of the American hemisphere rather than the nation state. The archive takes its name from Cuban nationalist José Martí. His famous 1893 essay “Our America” has become a touchstone for literary and cultural history scholars who have undertaken to understand “America” not as a synonym for an isolated United States but as a network of cultural filiations that have extended across the hemisphere from the period of colonization to the present. The archive fosters new research that examines American literatures from a hemispheric perspective, develops a collection of texts, curricular models and teaching materials that embody a hemispheric approach to the study of the early Americas, and generates professional and intellectual exchanges among scholars from various fields.
Why a Digital Archive:
From its inception in the fifteenth century, the history of print has been in close relationship with the history of capitalism, and the history of nationalism in Western culture. At least since the eighteenth century, western print culture has therefore traditionally reinforced the importance of the nation-state as the default frame of literary and historical reference. Still today, widely disseminated historical collections and literary anthologies, published for profit under the economic pressures of the highly capital-intensive print business, tend to include those materials that uphold, rather than complicate, national paradigms. The Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP), by contrast, offers new opportunities for rethinking the nation-state as the organizing rubric for literary and cultural history of the Americas. Its digital medium offers unique opportunities for a hemispheric approach to historical and literary analysis in two important ways. First, because the Our Americas Archive Partnership is published not for profit but rather for open access, it is free to bring together materials from throughout the Americas, including but not limited to the US American nation state, as well as rare texts and texts in the original language that offer a new level of access for research and pedagogy. The second key advantage of the digital over the print medium is its potential for international access and scholarly collaboration as well as editorial partnership. Through its dissemination on the World Wide Web, a digital archive can reach an international audience of scholars, researchers, and students who may not otherwise have access to documents housed in US archives. Moreover, no single archive has all the materials that scholars might require in their research and teaching. Unlike the print medium, the digital medium makes possible an unprecedented level of editorial collaboration through hyper-textual cross-referencing in cyber space. Because the Our Americas Archive Partnership makes available materials that are dispersed in different geographic locations, it facilitates collaboration and intellectual exchange among an international audience. In short, the digital medium offers rich opportunities for transnational exchange and is therefore uniquely suited for a hemispheric approach to history.
The Archive:
The archive is comprised of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1920. Its goal is to represent the full range and complexity of a multilingual “Americas” that includes Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. A partnership between the University of Maryland and Rice University, the Our Americas Archive is a long-term and inter-disciplinary project that explores the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies. This partnership between Maryland’s Early Americas digital archive (1492-1820) and Rice’s Americas collection (1811-1920) creates unique new research and teaching opportunities. The point of convergence between the Maryland and Rice archives is the cultural transformation created by the revolutions for independence that took place over a span of fewer than sixty years. The archive, however, spans the five hundred year period that saw the making of modern and colonial cultures in the Americas. Because of its range, the archive promises to reinvigorate the study of American literary and cultural history by creating surprising juxtapositions, emphasizing different models of periodization, and suggesting new avenues of cross-cultural influence.
Archive Impact:
This new, hemispheric approach to the past that the OAAP undertakes necessitates new research tools and requires new methods of historical and literary analysis, and the OAAP is already key to the development of these new methodologies and research practices. It will be the central research tool for the NEH Summer Seminar: Towards a Hemispheric American Literature, a collaboration between Columbia University and Rice University faculty and scheduled for Summer 2007. To enrich participants' research and to experiment with comparativist research tools, the NEH Seminar will integrate the Our Americas Archive Partnership into its weekly discussions. Recognizing that the OAAP is unique in that it brings together a diverse array of literary, historical and political documents that focus on nation formation across the hemisphere, the Seminar will use the archive as the basis for broader discussions about the research and pedagogical possibilities opened by digitization. Over the course of the seminar, participants will integrate the OAAP into their research and teaching materials with the goal of creating a new tool that they will continue to use in their research after the seminar's end.
As this application suggests, the OAAP is key to the transition from a national to a hemispheric American literary and historical study. Such study promises to reinvigorate literary and historical scholarship but also poses a serious challenge to received models of intellectual training, research, evaluation, and curricular development. Although many now recognize the importance of this transformation, there is scant institutional support or local intellectual community for scholars working in this new field of hemispheric historical and literary studies. English departments, for example, are dominated by Americanists trained in the study of a national literature. Even those who sincerely wish to take their work in new directions often lack the linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge to move beyond the conventional boundaries of the field. The OAAP is therefore vital to the efforts of faculty, students, and independent scholars who are reinventing Americanist study without the benefit of already existing comparative research models. The OAAP therefore fills a vital need by providing a research tool for scholars who may lack institutional and technical support at their home institutions, or those who are looking to take their work in new directions.
Archive Status:
Early evidence suggests that the Our Americas Archive Partnership has broad, multi-institutional impact and generates new research, new methodologies, and new collaboration for students, faculty, and researchers. The University of Maryland and Rice archives come from different starting points - the Maryland archive being presently focused on literary texts from the colonial Americas and the Rice archive being presently focused on historical documents from the nineteenth century - but we pool our resources and grow each collection in ways that maximize the OAAP for a broad audience of students and researchers. The Rice collection supplements its largely historical holdings with literary and broadly cultural material that increases its pedagogical utility. The Maryland EADA makes the EADA more useful for researchers by adding historical materials and facsimile texts. Collectively, the two archives gain from collaboration between the institutions' humanities technology tools - Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Rice's Digital Press and Connexions Initiative - a Content Commons collection of free scholarly materials and software tools to help authors publish, instructors build custom courses, and students explore the links between concepts, courses, and disciplines.
Back to top
